Users may not be too excited about Meta’s new AI chatbot but still it is taking it forward, Indian users are now ready to experience the wonder of Meta’s most advanced AI chatbot tool.
Yes, after testing with Indian users over the last few months, Meta is now rolling out its new AI search element for Indian users, starting with English language queries.
Meta began testing its AI chatbot with Indian users in April, but a full-fledged launch was delayed due to the general elections in the country.
But now, Meta is expanding access to the tool, bringing its Llama 3-powered chatbot to Facebook’s biggest user nation, where 378 million people access the platform each month.
But do people really want this?
Reception to Meta's AI chatbot has been mixed, with many users expressing frustration with trying to perform basic searches in the app.
Part of the problem here could be that Facebook’s older user base may be confused about what the new AI search functionality actually is, and how it works, resulting in unsatisfactory results in their efforts.
Meta knows that some people might not be fully on board with its new AI discovery and creation tools, but it's confident that people will warm to it in the long term.
But I'm not so sure. Because while the growing power of AI offers many new possibilities, Facebook is probably not where you really need them. Like, do you really need prompts like this on Facebook posts, which try to guide you through related searches?
Overall, this points to a larger problem with AI in social apps, in that, in fact, there’s no clear place for generative AI tools within platforms that are designed to facilitate human-to-human engagement.
You could of course argue that social media apps have moved beyond this use case, and are now about entertainment as well as social engagement. But the inclusion of generative AI, which emulates human reactions and actions, still feels fairly intrusive. And while it has some novelty value, there appears to be little more to it beyond that.
But these platforms keep telling us that this is the future, this is the next big thing, this is how we will all interact, so we better get used to it.
Is this an improvement? I don't know, but it also seems irrelevant to the broader AI debates.